Movie review: ‘Slumdog Millionaire’
In the 12 years since the iconic, masterful Trainspotting, Danny Boyle has tackled genres as varied as sci-fi, the family film, and made one helluva a zombie movie. His newest film, Slumdog Millionaire is arguably the first to really resemble that breakthrough effort. It, too, is essentially a series of tangentially related (and sometimes disturbing) vignettes: The titular character is Jamal, a young man from Mumbai who has nearly made it through the Hindi version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? getting every question right. (As the host, Anil Kapoor walks away with every highly-charged Millionaire scene.) Because of his lack of education and impoverished background, Jamal is suspected of cheating, and his interrogation begins the film, which is then told in perpetual flashback, beginning from his early childhood. As Jamal and his interrogators review the tape of his performance, he tells how he came to know the answers. (The order the questions are asked — and their answers — all conveniently match the chronology of Jamal’s life.)
Technically, Slumdog Millionaire is not without accomplishment. This is the best-looking digital photography I have ever seen in a cinema. (According to the December issue of American Cinematographer, only 40% of Slumdog was shot on film.) Shot with a raw immediacy and great technical prowess, Boyle and his crew have gone to great effort to capture the beauty and disarray of Jamal’s world. Boyle also manages to coax exceptional performances from his young actors, all playing key characters at different ages. Yet Slumdog’s story is only sporadically engaging; and the performances, though good, give us little insight into the script’s underdeveloped characters. Things are happening with such frequency — all at the same breakneck pace, music cranked to the same mind-numbing level — that eventually it all becomes inexplicably dull. Although not without its charms, in these key scenes, the film is curiously distant, and its climactic scene is so contrived that it left me rabidly underwhelmed.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Movies
Comments
By vistavision
December 16, 2008 11:37 PM | Link to this
I liked it, but felt that the movie was keeping me at arm’s length.